Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Syllable Prominence in German

HANSJÖRG MIXDORFF ; CHRISTIAN COSSIO MERCADO; ANGELIKA HÖNEMANN ; JORGE GURLEKIAN; DIEGO EVIN; HUMBERTO TORRES

Dresden

Conferencia; Inter Speech; 2015

ISCA

This paper explores the relationshipbetween perceived syllable prominence and the acoustic properties of a speech utterance.It is aimed at establishing a link between the linguistic meaning of anutterance in terms of sentence modality and focus and its underlying prosodicfeatures. Applications of such knowledge can be found in computer-basedpronunciation training as well as general automatic speech recognition andunderstanding. Our acoustic analysis confirms earlier results in that focus andsentence mode modify the fundamental frequency contour, syllabic durations andintensity. However, we could not find consistent differences between utterancesproduced with non-contrastive and contrastive focus, respectively. Only onethird of utterances with broad focus were identified as such. Ratings ofsyllable prominence are strongly correlated with the amplitude Aa of underlying accent commands,syllable duration, maximum intensity and mean harmonics-to-noise ratio.